Mail App not opening?

my iphone 3GS on 4.1 cannot open the mail app. as soon as touch the icon, the mail app opens and then crashes. I restarted the phone several times but to no avail. any solutions other than restoring because i don't want to update to 4.2 because it might not be unlockable when i want to sell it. any help is appreciated. thanks

It sounds like the mail app is corrupt. Your gonna have to restore your phone first try from backup then if that does not work as new. There should be a way to restore without updating. Perhaps other members know more about this as I am always on the latest update.

What I would try before you do a reload is first open the task switcher and quit the mail app, reboot the phone and try the mail app. If that doesn't work remove your email accounts totally. So there will be no email accounts at all then reboot the phone. Setup your email(s) one by one seeing if the mail app is working better.

Just read that doing a shutdown will not clear out things, but that doing a hard reset (the power and home button hold until the apple logo appears thing) should clear out RAM, caches, etc. What kind of restarting is the OP doing?

Probably running out of memory... try as others suggested close app and reboot the phone and try it again... sometimes some email of a certain size at the server may casue the mail app to close... try reboot if it fails... clear your mailbox via webmail and try again.

yeah, i'm not new to this stuff and i have already tried all of the stuff you guys mentioned. is there any other way than a restore? i really don't want to upgrade without knowing if it's unlockable or not. thanks